Benny L & Cleveland Watkiss - Metaphors

Benny L makes some of the hardest, most weaponised jump-up DnB going, all air-raid basslines and no mercy. Cleveland Watkiss is a jazz vocalist and one of the original jungle MCs, a proper piece of the music’s history. On paper they’ve got no business on the same record. On “Metaphors” that history and that horsepower actually meet: the vocal winds through the intro with real warmth before the bass drops in around 0:50 and turns the whole thing into a warehouse. What I love is that the bass doesn’t flatten the vocal, it converses with it. Watkiss floats over the top of the carnage like he’s done this ten thousand times, which he has. There’s a switch-up in the second half where the drums go double-time and the whole thing lifts off. It’s rowdy and soulful at once, which almost never happens because most producers pick a lane. This picks both. A proper DnB tune with a bit of lineage baked in.

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